He arrived to succeed because there were no more goals. His was not the trajectory of others, nor did he pretend to be; He arrived to climb the steps three at a time until he was at the top of the ladder.. But not. That is why now it raises doubts, as if they had already stopped seeing him as the leader they expected. Perhaps deflated or bottomless, between the heat, this heat, and the intensity of the two electoral campaigns in a row. It is Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the president of the Popular Party, who has consumed in one year the political stages that others develop for a decade. The doubts have come early and have spread, like the rash of indigestion, which is the worst thing that could happen to you.. Now Feijóo is playing it; now he is going to have to demonstrate the real depth of his leadership in the Spanish right. If he is able to get up and face the opposition legislature, in the event that the efforts of the socialist president are not cut short and he leads us to new elections.

For now, what we have all been able to see is that the bitter victory of the general elections on July 23 seems to have knocked out Feijóo. Some in the Popular Party affirm that, after that night, so disappointing, they asked him to get away, to get a few weeks out of the way. To rest, to breathe. Although it is impossible for him to disconnect, because the flashes of that Sunday are repeated in his head, when he was rubbing his eyes against the evidence of an unexpected puff. “We will arrive, we will arrive, you will see how we achieve it, this cannot end like this…”. How many times did the same thing have to be repeated? How many times did you hear it that night, as the election count progressed?

It is more difficult to recover from frustration than from defeat, and that is the burden that the president of the Popular Party has to overcome. “It is time”, they said emphatically, and it turned out that this moment had not arrived. The case of the motto of the Popular Party is worse because it delves into the wound, into the disappointment for the wasted moment, the lost opportunity after municipal and regional elections in which the right-wing candidates triumphed throughout Spain. They laid out a blue carpet for Feijóo to get to Moncloa, but he stumbled in the folds of euphoria and fell. The frustration, as was said before, is greater because his political career did not contemplate any fall. It is easy to appreciate if we look back and go back a decade, when he was president of the Xunta de Galicia and counted the elections by absolute majority victories, one after another.

In the Popular Party they had shuffled his name on many occasions, in each crisis that broke out, but Núñez Feijóo always managed to avoid them. His plan has never been to confront others to reach the national headquarters, that of fighting for support in each province and dodging the stab wounds at party congresses, the desertions and the lies of the endorsers… Simply, Feijóo was very well in Galicia and it was clear to me that the best way to achieve power for a political party is by acclamation. The expected moment came with the thunderous fall of Pablo Casado, and the Galician leader was finally able to achieve leadership without any opposition, longed for and expected. In a week he took control of the game and in a year he was already feeling the doors of the Moncloa. that was his plan.

From how events have unfolded, we can deduce that Alberto Núñez Feijóo's main problem at this time is that there was no plan B designed in the event that, as can happen, President Pedro Sánchez can revalidate his parliamentary alliances and continue ruling. The right-wing leader is doing well to claim his right to stand for investiture, as a party that has won the elections, even if he takes the podium with the certainty that he will not succeed. And that it will be Pedro Sánchez who will achieve it. But you must be clear that it is just about that, to comply with the democratic forms. The president of the PP should have assumed that, in reality, he has completely failed in the elections and, as such, begin planning a legislature that will be his first as leader of the opposition, in the Congress of Deputies. Continuing to lick the wounds of July 23, maintaining the electoral victory speech, without further ado, would mean a serious blindness about the challenges that lie ahead.

It is now, after the vertiginous year that he has lived since he left the Xunta de Galicia, when Alberto Núñez Feijóo has to demonstrate his true political stature. It is now, as was said before, when he is playing it, because what we are going to see, from the moment he steps on the rostrum of Congress, is whether he is capable of consolidating his leadership for the complete reconstruction of the center right in Spain, with options to re-opt for the government of the nation. Before him, José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy lost general elections and then managed to reach Moncloa, so the fiasco of July 23 should not be an impediment for Núñez Feijóo to continue leading the Popular Party and try again in the next electoral appointment. But he must be the one to dispel doubts about his leadership, about his political capacity, and start up the plan for one more legislature in the opposition that nobody had thought of..